Flash 2D Physics engines fast comparison: Nape (haXe) vs Box2D (Alchemy)

Posted on by July 11, 2019

Nape: 6.1 r49 Release for FP 10+ (built with haXe)
Box2D (Alchemy, WCK): last build from GitHub (pulled 09.11.11, built with Alchemy)
Flash Player: 11.0.1.152 Release 32 Bit Standalone (Projector) – Desktop
AIR: 3.0 – Mobile

I’ve tested these engines both on Desktop (Win 7, Core i7 Q740, 1.73 GHz per core, 16 GB DDR3-1333 MHz) and Mobile (Android 3.1, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, overclocked to 1.4 GHz per core).

I should tell, Nape was blazingly faster both on Desktop and mobile for me.

Example measurements with 1000 boxes on Desktop (30 FPS max):
Nape: 17-19 FPS at start, ~30 FPS after boxes fall.
Box2D: 2-3 FPS at start, 4-6 FPS after fall.

Please, feel free to run those swfs yourself:
Nape | WCK

Example measurements with 100 boxes on Mobile (GPU renderMode, 30 FPS max):
Nape: 30 FPS.
Box2D: ~14 FPS.

Please, feel free to compile and test AIR apps yourself if you wish:
FlashDevelop project (Switch Document class between MainNape.as and MainWCK.as and read *readme.txt carefully).

I’ll post some measurements done on iOS (iPad) later.

UPDATE
iPad results are similar to the Android.

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Flash 2D Physics engines fast comparison: Nape (haXe) vs Box2D (Alchemy) — 10 Comments

    • Just a quick note, that box2D ANE project is extremely limited and was done simply as a really quick demo for a presentation. It seems the developer has abandoned it. On that note, I’ve begun to develop a 100% complete Box2D ANE port. It’s a huge project because of the C-style callbacks required by the AIR runtime, weighing in right now somewhere around 25K lines. It’s not complete, but I project that it should be finished within a month or so. Follow me on github and maybe you can compare the benchmarks here to it when it’s all done. 🙂 http://digitalarchitectcanada.github.com/Box2DANE/

  2. HOW did you make 30 FPS on iPad? Did you use iPad 1 or iPad 2?

    My test: iPad 1, iOS 5 = 1.3 FPS (100 boxes & GPU mode).
    What version of Air did you use? I did 3.1 (Flex 4.6)

    • Hey, Greg! I used iPad1, GPU mode, StageQuality.LOW, AIR 3.0. Just try to download and compile a FlashDevelop project I mentioned in the post! Thanks for your comment!

  3. Nice to see a comparison on mobile which are harder to come by… mainly because the only mobile device I have is a £7.50 phone which can believe it or not, text!

    • Hi, Luca! Thanks for your comment!) I’ll be glad to help you with any other Nape tests on Android\iOS if you wish, just drop me a line about that.

  4. I like the way Box2D and Nape differ in what happens when the bulk of the blocks is at the lowest point: can they keep everything non-overlapping?

    Nape keeps boxes mostly non overlapping, but afterwards it expands upwards and starts a bouncy wave left and right, with some glitching blocks. Box2D compresses a lot more, but then expands to non overlap and slowly and wobbly settles, takes long time, but no self reinforcing waves.

    • Hi, Bart! Thanks for the comment, I believe all this stuff can be easily tweaked. There are could be applied different materials, different gravitation and a lot of other settings to the bodies and “world”, you know. Feel free to try to tweak all those things in the attached project and see how physics behavior changes.